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Archival description area

Name of creator

Biographical history

He is a is a German artist known for black and white photographs, which depict performances and sculptures of his own construction. He studied singing and music at the Mendelssohn Bartholdy Akademie in Leipzig, before taking photography courses under Heinz Hajek-Halke at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. During his early years in Berlin, he continued to be involved in music and performed in the choir of the city’s Opera. After a trip to Italy in 1976, Appelt started to focus his photographic attentions on his own body. Today, Appelt’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Custodial history

Scope and content

Images in the exhbition featured the attic of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fascinated by sites charged with history, German artist Dieter Appelt uses his examination of the attic to inquire into the invisible, mysterious, and indefinite forces of decay that lie beyond everyday experience. By concentrating on structural details, and by confronting the surfaces of the wooden beams, he has photographed the attic in such a way that it becomes a new reality, marked by the corrosive signs of passing time. Photographs of images in the exhibition: No. 3, 5 and 14 from the sequence Bethanien, 1984-91.